http://www.crmguru.com/gurubase.php3?itm=493
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CRM.Insight                                                   VOL 5.14
May 2, 2002                                                CRMGuru.com
Circ: 100,000+
               "Customers at the Heart of Your Business"
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CONTENTS:

* EDITOR'S NOTE: More Alphabet Soup
* PERSPECTIVE: xCRL -- Reducing Integration Expense with Standardization
* FEATURE: CRM in 2002: Diverse, Competitive and (Hopefully) Integrated
* GURUBASE SPOTLIGHT: New Content Worth a Look
* EDITOR'S PICKS: The Best Stuff on the Net
* CRM EVENTS: Featured Conferences and Seminars


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EDITOR'S NOTE

More Alphabet Soup
By Bob Thompson

A hearty "welcome" to the many new members joining CRMGuru the past 
couple of weeks. As a reminder, this month we're focused on the critical

but somewhat geeky topic of CRM integration and architecture. If you 
think hardware and software is tough, wait 'till you tackle CRM's 
"peopleware" challenges. That's our agenda the rest of May.

Meanwhile, back at the acronym factory, there's a new four-letter model 
rolling off the line. This one you'll want to take for a CRM spin in the
future. Read on to learn about xCRL and how Ram Kumar is attempting to 
standardize customer information sharing. Skip this article if doing 
things faster and cheaper is not important to your organization. 

 
[Send comments to mailto:editor@crmguru.com]
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PERSPECTIVE

xCRL: Reducing Integration Expense with Standardization
By Ram Kumar

The rapid adoption of e-business has created a new world of 
interoperability between organizations, systems, processes, platforms, 
tools and, most importantly, data. When we consider customer management 
initiatives such as CRM/eCRM, Single/360 degree view, and Customer 
Information Warehouse, there are factors other than software license 
fees and customization, training, and maintenance that raise the cost of
deployment. 

Integration of systems, for example, can be a far more significant and 
costly challenge. In most large enterprises, customer information is 
captured and stored in multiple "proprietary" systems. Bringing it all 
together for analysis in a customer information management system 
usually involves time-consuming integration using the proprietary APIs 
(application program interfaces) provided by CRM and other enterprise 
software vendors. Backend systems integration is where most of the real 
cost -- and risk -- of implementing CRM and ERP systems lies. Many of 
these implementations have significantly under delivered because cost 
has prohibited them from interfacing with other key systems.

If a standard way of defining customer information and relationships 
existed that was vendor neutral, open (i.e. independent of tools, 
systems, languages and platforms), and enabled portability and 
interoperability of data, then it would be possible to reduce the 
expensive and complex integration problems associated with new business 
initiatives. The proposed standard -- by the Customer Information 
Quality Committee of OASIS -- is called extensible Customer 
Relationships Language, or xCRL, and is intended to meet this 
requirement. 

xCRL, is a set of XML vocabulary specifications for defining customer 
characteristics such as name, address, age, customer number, e-mail 
address, and so on. In addition, xCRL describes, in a standard way, how 
individual customers and organizations interact with one another. As 
currently defined, xCRL enables users to describe relationships such as 
person-to-person, person-to-organization or organization-to-organization

in a standard way. For example, if a CRM system and an Enterprise 
Resource Planning system both understood xCRL definitions, they could 
automatically interoperate without needing expensive, custom 
integration. This would accelerate the time taken to deploy such systems
and allow them to interact more readily with a wider range of other 
systems.

Work is in progress to extend xCRL to include customer relationships 
with other entities such as accounts, products and services. 

[Ram Kumar is the founding chairman of the Customer Information Quality 
technical committee of OASIS. He is the Chief Technologist and Architect
of MSI Business Solutions Pty. Ltd., Australia. He can be reached at 
rkumar@msi.com.au.]
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